The middle path that let me keep going much longer: automate the parts that do not do the work, and keep the part that does.
An hour per email is mostly not the writing. It is finding the person, working out what they do, and checking they are a fit. That research is compressible:
- Build a list in batches rather than one at a time. Sourcing fifty prospects in one sitting is far faster per head than sourcing one.
- Keep notes in one place with the same fields each time, so the research is reusable and you stop re-doing it.
- Have a skeleton — the parts that are always the same, with obvious gaps for the two or three sentences that are actually about them.
Done properly this takes an hour down to twenty minutes without changing what the recipient reads, and the specific sentences are the entire reason it works, so they are the last thing you touch.
The other thing worth doing now, while you are still writing them by hand: keep every email you send and mark which ones converted. You are sitting on the raw material for whatever you build next, and it is much easier to find the pattern in forty saved emails than to reconstruct it from memory in six months.
When you do graduate, that archive is the graduation.